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Meaningful Play Conference Roundup

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Nick Fortugno’s The Play of Persuasion

This was the inaugural year for Meaningful Play, a conference brought together by Brian Winn, Director of the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University.  The first year for a conference can often be a rocky time as logistical hurtles are overcome and kinks worked out.  So how’d it go?  Read on to find out.

First off let’s start off with the purpose of the conference.  For those of you who don’t know, Meaningful Play was created to bring “the industry” and “academics” together to talk about what worthwhile things the medium of gaming can do…but it was design to be more than meeting of the minds for the two sides our industry, it was also design to expose educators to the realm of gaming and facilitate communication between game creators and those who might eventually employ our games (or be the outside experts who help us build them) in order to aid us, as an industry, to craft games that have an impact beyond the borders of the screen.

So how about the people?  Fantastic.  I was shocked at both the level of persona that showed up and how appropriately they were chosen.  Richard Hilleman, Ian Bogst, Nick Fortugno, Drew Davidson all gave talks – oh, and they had some guy named James Portnow speaking…  In general the crowd, all the way down to the student researchers, was intelligent, respectful and engaged.

Overall the content provided by the talks, papers and panels was highly engaging and not littered with the same information we’ve heard over and over again at industry conventions.  New ideas were being freely offered here in a spirit of camaraderie and shared endeavor.  Some of the credit for that has to go to the attending academics who, in general, approached the sharing of their work as the culmination of their labor rather than a dangerous exchange of trade secrets that might create new competitors.

Sometimes communication between the wildly different disciplines attending the conference was difficult, as often attendees found themselves without even a common pool of terminology to draw from, but mutual respect and patience often overcame these barriers.  And, after all, opening dialogue between these disciplines was what this conference was all about.  

As far as the size goes, the conference probably had a few hundred attendees.  It was large enough that the keynotes were always packed and yet small enough that you’d see the same faces over and over.  One of my worries for the future is that the conference will grow beyond this intimate size and lose some of the atmosphere of group discussion.

This atmosphere was bolstered by the ample and well scheduled opportunities for socializing and networking.  Each day of the conference had a mixer scheduled into it.  The mixers were always at a location that was “hip” but not too loud to prevent easy conversation.  The mixers were also always scheduled early enough that groups formed during the mixer could break off and spend time afterwards sharing a meal and really becoming acquainted.  The level of discussion and conversation I encountered at both the mixers and post-mixer socializing was unparallel by any conference I’ve attended.  This is one area where meaningful play truly excelled.

One area where I feel the conference fell short was on the location.  Meaningful Play is located on the Michigan State campus.  While the campus itself is lovely and the building the conference was housed in quite adequate for conference, East Lansing Michigan is a little out of the way from any of the major gaming hubs.  Die hards made it out to the conference from all corners of the world, but I think the location will prevent attendees who would otherwise benefit from such a conference from ever attending Meaningful Play.

Overall I would call it a resounding success.  While there were glitches and hiccups (and one emergency cancelation) the conference went over remarkably smoothly for its first year.   Moreover, it fills a unique and relevant niche in the growing field of games industry conferences.  I look forward to attending many more Meaning Plays in the coming year.

Below I’ll try and give you a sample of one of the keynotes:

The Play of Persuasion: Why “Serious” Isn’t the Opposite of Fun

A Nick Fortugno Experience

Nick Fortugno’s (founder of Rebel Monkey Studios and the lead designer for Dinner Dash and Ayiti: The Cost of Life) lecture, The Play of Persuasion: Why “Serious” Isn’t the Opposite of Fun, was one of the (many) high points of the Meaningful Play conference.  In this lecture Nick detailed why “serious” games not only should, but in some ways must, remain fun if they want to persuade on a mass scale.

The lecture came out of a discussion Nick had with his students at Parsons.  He typically begins the year by asking his students to make a list of games and then asks them to determine if there are any factors that are universal throughout those games.  Every previous year students had agreed on at least one clear and ubiquitous element: fun.  This year that was not the case.

This year about a third of his students argued that a game did not, in fact, have to be fun.  They asked for some other terminology: engaging or compelling.  Why?  Because, they argued, that fun is inappropriate for some topics, that you can’t make a “fun” game about Darfur. 

After months of thought, Nick presented us with the opposite hypotheses: for a game to truly be persuasive on a mass scale, it must be fun.  He took us through historical examples in other mediums, starting with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  The literary merits of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are questionable, but the social merits are undeniable.   Why did Uncle Tom’s Cabin have such a profound effect?  Because it didn’t fight the conventions of the medium.  It embraced being a populist, sentimentalist novel.  It embraced melodrama and accepted being something of a “light read” to bring these social topics to the fore.  So too, Nick argued, must games.

He went through a list of examples, using everything from Tele Nouvelle to Will and Grace, to demonstrate the social impact of that can be made by projects which embrace their medium rather than try to be staid and “serious”.   He went on to illustrate this with a group of game examples that showed having a fun core mechanic in no way prevents you from achieving something meaningful with a game.

My analysis?  I agreed with almost everything Nick had to say.  He’s absolutely right that for us to have our “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” we can’t fight the medium we work in, serious games must remain fun to have the type of wide ranging impact they are looking for.

Of course, there is one point I question: whether games should persuade.  As an interactive medium walking the line between “persuading” and “indoctrinating” is a tough task, perhaps an unmanageable one, and that’s something we as an industry have to take a long cold look at as we mature…but that’s a topic best saved for another article, perhaps one in the near future.

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